


and yours is a noble heart (i don’t deserve to hold)

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Series: full of field and stars, you carried all of time [4]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Drug Use, F/F, and will. hopefully tie this bit together, blood tw, half of these apply to the second chapter, i.e. spiderwebs, idk man it’s 3:30 am, like. a lot of it., max has to do a lot of work behind the scenes, rachel’s still a god, suicide TW, tahoe at night has old magic, the usual stuff for this series, which is a better summary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-04-19 15:46:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14240577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: (there’s an altar in the woods.)Victoria is all of twelve years old when she kisses a girl.Victoria is all of eighteen when she (almost, sometimes) kills one.





	1. please, somebody make me weak

**Author's Note:**

> interspersed poem is from stopping by woods on a snowy evening by robert frost; title is from noble heart by PHOX

(There’s an altar in the woods.)  
—

Victoria is all of twelve years old when she kisses a girl.

Victoria is all of eighteen when she (almost, sometimes) kills one.  
—

The girl was your best friend because her parents were in the sights of yours. She had a big white dog that never barked, resting dutifully at the end of her bed with its wide snout between its paws.  
Twelve was the first year you started to feel like your stomach was hollow, and her house looked like you felt. Tall, empty. Always cold.

-  
You resent a lot of things about growing up, but not the house.  
Your parents reserved their kindness for artists. They invited them over after exhibitions, held you out to them in hopes of you soaking up their creativity.  
(Your parents love you, albeit uneasily. They raised you with the promise that they’d show the same compassion they offered artists to you when you were one of them. They didn’t much care how you got there.)  
Most liked you when you were little enough that your frown was endearing and not the scathing bitch face it bloomed into. Before you overanalyzed with an end goal.

One of your mother’s favorites did a portrait of you for your eleventh birthday.  
Your mother liked her limited palettes and dramatic shadows, wanted you to see yourself as sharp, imposing.  
On a rainy Saturday she painted you in all red and black and white in the foyer. It was the first time someone had looked at you for so long all at once.  
You were never a fidgety child, but you kept getting up with the excuse of going to the bathroom. All the attention, the fixation— it made you burn.  
The portrait hung above your bed until you left for Blackwell— you didn’t dislike looking at yourself, you never have, but over time you came to fear your expression.  
Mother says it was the happiest picture of you she’d seen, not unsatisfied, not unsurprised.

It wasn’t happy. It wasn’t so simple as birthday presents or good green tea.  
You looked as you were, as you didn’t know to be, feeling loved by a stranger and afraid of how easy it was.  
The feeling, the warm chill of being looked at, being told to move so you could be seen, the (mindless) encouragement; it was your favorite fear, and you spent the next seven years chasing it, built your ego on feeling worthy.  
-

  
When you kissed your best friend at age twelve you felt worthy.

  
You felt distinctly _unworthy_ when she told your parents.  
You felt distinctly unworthy when they told _her_ parents that you were allergic to their dog and dropped them as clients.  
In their own way they were protecting you, never held you to any of their standards when it came to love, but to twelve year-old Victoria, silence was not safe.  
—

You’re eighteen when you pray to the first god you’ve ever seen.

You sob into your pillow with your jaw cracking and Taylor waits dutifully outside.

No one says out loud that it’s your fault. You don’t need them to.

They cordon off the space. Her blood isn’t scrubbing out of the pavement.  
-  
You scrabble at Max like she’s the scrawny mast of your sinking ship, hoisting your decaying self on her.  
“Help me,” you say to her collarbone. “I know you have it.”

Her eyes swim with a sadness deeper than you know when she holds your wrists together and agrees.  
-

The cairn in the woods roars when you step into it. The trees slide into a spin of green and then black, and there’s a voice knit together from the sound your bones are making against each other.  
_Prescott really fucked up_ , you think. You think of the stain of whiskey disappearing too-fast against the dark grass. The daisies and clovers never wilted under it, not from party after party. _Nitrogen fixing._

You wonder if Max has killed you. That would qualify as a solution, sacrificing you to the patron deity of your sins, sending you back to the earth. It seems alright. Kate will be too far above you, among clouds, to reach where you will fall, below moss and earthworms to brimstone, but that’s probably better.  
-  
_The woods are lovely, dark and deep—_  
—  
You are eighteen and repercussion hangs heavy but does not fall.

  
Kate is talked down. It’s not you, you fucking coward.  
You do a lot of coke and grit your teeth together in the bathroom. The lights are blue like the bottom of a pool at night and you feel split down the middle, fizzing with cracks. Your nose pours blood and it smears into long pink streaks against the porcelain.

  
-  
Kate has been dangerously kind. You’re not good at apologizing, but she’s even better at tapping out where your guilt is just under the surface. You curled your toes in her carpet when she put Alice in your lap and took your hand to thread it through fur.  
You bracketed your hands around her with stroking thumbs, breathing through your mouth. Soaking in the talisman, feeling your guilt bleed out and haze the room.

Kate waded through to return Alice to her cage, humming.  
“I’m sorry,” you husked, and the sound from her throat stopped. She did not turn to face you, head bowed towards where Alice was burrowing back into a corner reproachfully, and your knees creaked and sawed like old metal when you stood to leave.  
-

  
You should not be here.  
The blood slows to a trickle and you stuff bits of Kleenex in your nostril, not allowing yourself to wince. You owe yourself the pain.  
Taylor does not try to keep you from leaving. You can feel her eyes on you from the leather sofa. She knows where you’re going, knows your resolve not to be your usual, awful self is eggshell-thin.

  
You find Kate on the roof, almost fall backward down the stairwell. She’s just sitting, slightly back from the raised edge, but the realization doesn’t stop you.  
Your breaths go shallow, unfulfilling, painful in your ribs. This is the second panic attack in as many days, hits while you’re down and already curled inward; you sink down against the door and close your palms over your eyes:  
You’re so fucking stupid.  
You can’t help her.  
You’re poison, and even with immunity you can do no good. You just pass on through, blood sticking, rotten in your wake.  
Your naïveté is dangerous. It always has been. Your intentions are worse. Kate being okay means she’s learned how to let you fall around her without following suit. She can’t hold you up— you’re sand— and no one can scoop out quicksand from itself. Any part of you that escapes serves the same purpose when returned.

Kate’s God does not turn away from sin in condemnation, but because he cannot bear to see it. Light breaks from darkness by reducing it, and darkness cannot creep back in as long as light remains. You were made to be crushed and scattered, you exist to be the spaces in between better people. You are not tangible. You are the basest of fears. You exist to be moved on from.  
Kate is good to be with you, erroneously so, but her God cannot be.  
(In the snidest corner of your mind you mark— God: 0, Kate: 1— but you can’t blame Him.)

 

You’re doing your best to blot out all your senses, now.  
And it’s Kate that finds you like that, the buzzing in your head so loud that you can’t hear yourself cry.

You don’t trust yourself to be anything but awful to her. But she does.  
-  
It is not enough.

There is something wrong. Everything feels off a half-degree, the distance from the top of the moon to the bottom, like the moment before you look down to see the arrow blooming sickly from your stomach.

  
The cairn scatters you like dust, but accepts.  
You wonder where Max has been.

You wonder if you are to die, and shake with an unearthly strain of deja vu.  
From a great ways away the trees part and tip up, and you see they sprout from the temples of something, raking at the cold stars. There is a voice shaking the ground, but you are ascending from it too quickly. You do not have eyes, but in the way of closing them you will yourself to stop seeing.

You dream in deep greens.  
-  
_but i have promises to keep—_  
—  
You are eighteen and you are afraid of fairy circles.

The air is sharp overhead and you hang back under the canopy of the trees clustered at the clearing edge. An unpleasant fizz runs through your bones and you hiss at Kate to be careful.

Kate is not afraid of fairy circles.  
But she should be.

Kate reaches out to toe one of the largest stones with her boot and the shock peels the both of you open.  
It’s like flashbang, manganese in a fire, and Kate is gone. You are falling and falling and _burning and you—_  
—  
You are eighteen and Kate falls off the roof.  
—  
You are eighteen and Kate watches you overdose.  
—  
You are eighteen and a tree cleaves your car.  
—  
You are eighteen and you don’t wake from dreams of a deer with yellow eyes and antlers big and heavy and stirring the stars.  
—  
_and miles to go before I sleep—_  
—  
You are eighteen and the road eats up your headlights, stretching out into the void of Northern California.  
Lights glimmer in little pockets on distant hills, towns all tucked up in bald spots between trees. Red dirt is crumbling from shallow cliffs on either side of the car, holding to the knobbly roots of firs and patched through with snow.  
Kate’s asleep in a little ball in the passenger seat, hands twisted up in your pinnacle Car Blankets™. The Antlers are crooning low and dangerous and everything is purple-blue and white and black beyond you and you feel something old and slow moving in your skull as you crest another hill and the snowbanks and highway spread out below you like paint under a knife. It smells like winter, like snowmelt on the floor of the car and crushed pine needles and air so cold it feels like water rushing in your lungs, like the faint burn of the defrost after it’s been left on for the past four hours. Tahoe has some old magic in it that leaches up from the earth when it snows, and you almost want to shake Kate awake to see it, to dip down into the valley in silence. You want to sit and crush handfuls of it to your lips like you used to, pressing that burning cold into your mouth, overheated from your three jackets but numb and frosting over in the soaked toes of your boots and the frozen tips of your hair and the slick running of your nose that never quite stopped.  
You drive in silence. Your playlist shifts over to PHOX and your eyes roll and blink too fast as you fight to stay awake.

Kate wakes just enough to slurry up the sleet of the driveway with her toes and lean heavily on you as you ascend the stairs. She snuffles something sleepy and syrupy-sweet into your neck and you lay her out somewhat gracelessly on the bed. Someone has changed the quilts since you were last here.  
The winter night is empty in the way that you can’t quite convince yourself there’s anything left beyond the trees, where the road curves and slopes back up on an incline that, for all the straining of your eyes, may as well not exist. The darkness makes an island of the cabin, your car, in the sea of nothing and cold, and you shake and return inland with the duffels.

Kate’s hands sear at your waist when you sidle in next to her, filling in the divots between your hipbones and the crux of your pelvis.  
You sigh heavily, not unhappy, and hush at her to sleep when she noses warm at your cold neck, tamping down at your jugular to feel the threadiness of your breath. Sleepy sex with Kate is aching, heavenly, but your toes are freezing and you don’t think she can physically open her eyes.  
The both of you drag down the mattress in the tangle you’ve become, and you imagine the room as layers of sheets and darkness piling over you, so innumerable that they hide the shifting of your breaths.  
Snow slides in big, distant clumps off the roof, woolly thuds as it lands, and Kate bumps her head against your chin, like a pleased cat, before settling.

There is no video gnawing up dimensional holes in your phone. Kate’s contact has a rabbit emoji next to it.  
Your texts scroll back months to read, a shaky love story in reverse.  
You did not write it, but you are unwise to the strands so carefully tying your wrists to hers.  
Thin, invisible anywhere under direct sunlight— something unimaginable from here— but steady, like spider silk.

_(and miles to go before I sleep.)_


	2. you know, it’s been a while since i felt anything at all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one’s hurt me, man

It’s around two in the morning when you wake from dark, blurry dreams.

Kate sleeps so dead to the world that you’re surprised she breathes at all— she makes some low noise of protest when you roll to the other edge of the big, low bed, but doesn’t move.

 

You try to eke out on the balcony without opening the door too widely; the night air here is sweet and unforgiving all at once and you don’t want it to break the warm, syrupy darkness inside.

 

The floor under your bare feet is so cold it feels like wading out into water.

Max is already sitting in the far deck chair. Even against the moon she seems especially bright, like she’s buzzing with something.

 

“Hey, Vic.”

—

 

You know before she says anything else. Honestly, you think you’ve known for a while.

“I can’t stay, can I?”

 

“No.”

 

You think about meeting Kate in the summer. Her hair was ash-blonde, back then, and she still had Alice. Back then the deer stopped coming into town, and you’d only see them with peeling antlers in the distance.

 

(It was Kate that kissed you first, in her room, with Alice nosing sleepily at your fingers on the bed. There was something dreary spilling from Max’s borrowed speaker, and your eyes felt gossamer-thin to close.)

 

You almost have to be angry.

“Why did you bring me here?”

 

Max shrugs. Ever the wordsmith.

“I wanted you to be happy.”

The supplementary _but_ goes unspoken. You feel it all the same.

 

You wonder if the snow would pile against your door quiet and mercifully in the night, or if it would find you on the road.

-

 

You mean to steal back in without waking Kate, but she’s sitting up in the middle of the bed. In the dark, you almost can’t see the lazy, upward curl to her mouth.

 

Articulating feels unfathomably distant— you kiss her when you crawl back in and she laced your fingers together, placid.

 

“You’re crying,” she says, simply, and your fingertips come away wet when you touch them to your face.

 

“Just a dream,” you husk back at her, around the weight in your throat.

 

It’s snowing again.

—

 

At a Vortex party, someone finally explains why there are so many fucking deer in Arcadia.

 

“Yeah, they’re angels.”

 

Really, they’re more speaking to the ceiling than to anyone in particular, and you’re more than a little faded, but something about it catches you off guard.

 

“There’s this legend that the spirit of the Bay’s actually this girl that died out in the forest. Got shot by a hunter or something.”

 

It starts a debate about how she actually died, and then whether or not a hunter would mistake someone for a deer, and it dies down the way arguments do when all parties are more tired than anything else.

 

“Anyway, whenever someone else gets killed before their time, she turns them into a deer, and they spy on the town for her.”

 

You can sense it coming a mile off.

“So, like, that Amber girl?”

 

No one answers.

—

 

(You wonder if you’ll ever stop dreaming of storms.

But, well. PTSD does what it says on the tin.)

 

Chloe’s truck is, admittedly, cleaner than you expected. So is she, these days.

Her hair’s starting to show through brown at the roots, you note silently. You manage to make it almost the whole drive without talking, but she finally dips below the speed limit when you’re close to the house.

 

“Listen, Victoria.”

You’ve never heard Chloe speak without a rattle to her voice. Today is not the day for change of that kind.

 

“Max and Kate are a lot more forgiving than me, and I know they know what you went through, and I know you’re trying.”

 

She turns to look you dead in the eyes, and you almost start writhing in your seat trying to maintain eye contact. (That, too, has never gotten any easier.)

 

“But if you _ever_ hurt Kate again, I’ll fucking kill you. And I don’t think Max would stop me.”

 

You swallow and train your eyes out the windshield, on the rough sky. Through the open windows the air smells like a loose tangle of pines, dirt, and ozone.

 

“Got it.”

-

 

Kate’s watching Alice shuffle around in the grass of the yard, bending the blades and the stems of clover flowers.

When you started staying over she was too tired to put her hair up, but today’s it’s back in that massive bun. She’s so serene you feel like an interloper, but you know that serene does not mean happy, and she hums when you sit to lean against her on the porch.

 

“Max and Chloe are making dinner.”

You’re struck with the quiet urge to keep to a whisper.

“But it’ll be a while.”

 

With the sun setting the sky is this strange, roiling flush, like a line of bruises beyond the trees.

You’re really hoping it doesn’t rain.

 

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” Kate says, and your head aches dully. You say nothing. She knows you know.

 

You imagine she wouldn’t say that to anyone else— not anyone who wasn’t there, anyway.

(She let you hold Alice in the back of one of the ambulances. You’d never held her, before— her ears were paper-thin under your fingers, and you’d be hard-pressed to say which of you was shaking harder.)

 

There’s this far, low rustle, and then a deer is stepping out of the brush at the end of the yard. Alice stills in the grass with her ears back, and the deer stops mid-stride to watch you.

 

Its eyes are dark as the woods behind it— squinting, they’d look just like two clean holes in its head.

 

 

After a long moment, it turns and lopes back across the yard to melt into the trees. You let your head fall to Kate’s shoulder, and stay there for a long while.

 

Later, Kate will tell Max that the deer are coming back— you hadn’t seen any, since the storm.

She’ll pad upstairs to put Alice back, and you’ll watch Max stop dead in the kitchen and her eyes bloom thick with old, old tears.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first multi-chapter segment i’ve added for this; i hope it isn’t Too nonsensical  
> @seafleece on tumblr, come say hi  
> @quetzalcoatlmundi is where the writing goes


End file.
